


A Verse I Didn’t Want to Learn

by orphan_account



Series: Brocol lerayt edek?; or, Trektober 2020 Challenge [4]
Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Addiction, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Control, Free Will, Gen, Stream of Consciousness, Trektober 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 08:53:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26849227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: The Jem’Hadar youth has inherited death and pain. As he travels the wormhole, attempting to reach his people, the reckoning of his preordained dependency crushes him, all while Odo’s order plays like a refrain in the background. Perhaps if the horrible need in his brain is met, he would be able to exercise what Odo named “control.”Trektober 2020: October 4thPrompt: Aliens Made Them Do It (obviously, a ‘lil divergent, but I stand by my work)
Relationships: Odo & The Abandoned Jem’Hadar
Series: Brocol lerayt edek?; or, Trektober 2020 Challenge [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1955005
Kudos: 2
Collections: Trektober 2020





	A Verse I Didn’t Want to Learn

**Author's Note:**

> Ack. I don’t know if this will be intelligible at all. I wanted to try a stream of consciousness pseudo verse style. Hmm...
> 
> I am intrigued by the abandoned Jem’Hadar. Free Will is almost expected by society. Free Will and compliance (or, at least, the ownership of one’s actions) is expected. That’s how order is maintained.
> 
> But, for the afflicted Jem’Hadar, is Free Will an option in the face of such crippling need? Can they be expected to have the faculties to chose the “right way“ when their dependency takes over their entire brain processing? 
> 
> That’s what’s in my head, anyway.
> 
> If you’re wondering how I feel that I’ve completed the prompt, my flimsy reasoning is that the Vorta (their drugs) are making the Jem’Hadar lose his grasp on his own free will.

Cyclical lights, and he’s retching without sound, violent. He can barely scrape the breath from the air and the runabout shrinks around him— encapsulated now, in an alloy pill. The wormhole unhinges its jowls to gulp him down unhesitatingly, greedily, voracious and— vapid. 

So  _ stupidly _ automatic, he’s laughing— As though _it_ is the sole force in the cosmos that  _ wants _ something.

If his skull were faultless enough to contain the burgeoning there then he may be enthralled by this, his rapture, home. But. Skin and anything holier bends to the rupture beneath where a different sucking fails to find its need, he is clawing through the dermis like mortar to free whatever is —

_ Another corporeal being. _

Hatched from the duranium shell, though not from the agony mushrooming in his skull, the youth is deposited, dejectedly, on the floor of Odo’s room—  _ impossible! _

_ This one has little cognizance. _

Odo— Odo steps toward him, feet sink into the carpet.

How is he here?

The battle room, the simulation, arms slack, not attacking, and he swats at its legs, at the juncture of its knees.

_ Aggressive _ . _Destructive_.

Odo, from the other side, in the room of orange-cream light:

_ Yet, drawing not from an exterior experience... _

  
Gravel voices surround him, every face is that of the Founder’s— no, the failed Founder. You don’t have to be— And, he is gritting his jaw to the cracking point.

_ But one within.  _

_  
Look at the impulses, inside. _

Knees rest on the medbay bed, the figures close in, all Odo— he dare not lash out at _him_ — he said, Control.  


Each Odo holds a tricorder, inspecting him, and the light is glaring. The searing of each optical nerve is distinct, they feel like wires. The desire to scream is not slaked by screaming. He’s drinking nothingness, devouring only a void, glutting himself— Odo told him,

Control.

Control.Control.Control.Control.Control.Control.Control.Control.Control.Control.Control.Control.Control.Control.Control.Control—

_ They are rapid. He is suffering. _

_  
Look, inside, he… needs. _

  
  


Odo. Odo’s room. Odo told him, Control. But!

“Nnnngghh! You— you  _ wouldn’t _ control mmmmme!”

  
  


A cell, a wall of crackling, of restraint. Odo is there. Odo removes the wall. There are many of Odo, but he— he is still one.  


On his heels, perched. Collapsed. Odo lowers to offer authoritative eyes. He says— he recites—

_ “It’s alright. Everything’s under control now.” _


End file.
